Act on infrastructure and application violations using alerts

Checking on and ensuring the health of your environments is an essential operations task wherever you are and at any point in the day. AppMon Web's Operations dashboard shows alerts from triggered Infrastructure and Application incidents, and the number of currently ongoing alerts. You can view the Operations dashboard from any browser-enabled device.

Create Incident Rules to set up alerts

After subscribing to measures and configuring thresholds for the measures, create incident rules to define whom to notify when the thresholds are exceeded and how to act on violations. See Incidents and Alerting to learn how.

An incident rule in AppMon is a mapping between threshold violations of measures and the actions taken. Incident rules can be based on multiple measures and different severity levels of threshold violations to trigger notifications. Threshold checks are done every 10 seconds. The threshold may be for cyclic measures like CPU and memory that are sampled every 10 seconds, or for transactions.

If all the thresholds defined in the incident rule are violated, an incident is created and can be viewed in the Alert overview, even if no actions have been configured for the incident rule.

Once done, the Alerts tile of the Operations dashboard displays alerts.

Alert tile on the operations dashboard

Click the ongoing alerts button in the Operations dashboard to open the Alerts page.

Using the alerts as an initial launching point in diagnosing or analyzing incidents, you can spot problem hotspots, where they come from, and easily share your insight across teams to resolve issues. Because alerts in the Alert Overview can be easily filtered to show infrastructure or application alerts, you can quickly determine if problems originate in your infrastructure or certain applications.

Viewing additional incident details

The time line and alert list in the Alerts overview are synchronized. Selecting an entry in the list highlights the incidents hash in the time line. The time of the incident and the incident's duration display above the hash. In the same way, selecting a hash in the time line highlights the alert entry for the incident in the Alert list.

Click Details on the right of the desired alert entry in the Alert list to view additional details about the incident. The Alert Details message displays the alert status information and the name of any person assigned to analyze the incident. The alert name and description also display. Click Close to close the Alert Details message.

View and set the scope of alerts

Alerts that display in the Alerts list of the Alerts page are those that fall within the range set by the alert severity and status. Severities are part of defining measure thresholds associated with rules. This information is set when configuring incident rules. See Incidents and Alerting to learn how.

Use the filter sidebar of the Alerts page to set the scope of viewed incidents based on alert severity and alert state.

Informational: Display only alerts whose not defined as Warning or Severe.

Status reflects the current incident state, and includes:

Created: The incident has been created, but no statuses have been given to the incident.

In Progress: The incident status has been changed to In Progress in the AppMon Client.

Confirmed: The incident has been changed to Confirmed in the AppMon Client.

Focus on specific alerts for analysis

The Alerts page displays a running timeline with hash mark indicators for each incident that is configured to show alerts, along with a listing of qualified alerts that have been generated for incidents. These alerts are for incidents triggered during the time frame set for the data scope in AppMon Web. There are several ways to trim the alerts list to help find a specific alert:

Use the sliders to either side of the time line to reduce the time frame and exclude alerts from the list that fall outside of the time line. After moving the sliders, click Reset timeframe to move the sliders back to their original positions.

In the Alert list, click the hash in the Severity column of the Alerts list to expand or collapse a list of alerts under each alert rule.

Analyze an incident in the AppMon Client

When you find the desired alert, click the Open in Client button for the Alert rule to drill down for detailed analysis. This opens an Incidents dashboard in the AppMon Client, where you can perform rule and incident analysis activities, including:

See detailed information for the duration, description, status, state, and involved agents for each incident captured for the incident rule.

Edit or disable the incident rule.

Assign, confirm, or set all incidents or individual incidents within in a rule to In Progress.

Export the incident session.

See Incidents dashlet for more information in the Incidents dashboard in the AppMon Client.